Omake: How Commissar Cain finds out Jurgen is a Psyker.
So there I was, surrounded by the unconscious bodies of half a hundred heretical witches, sobbing in terror as I clutched the newly emptied corpse of my girlfriend as her soul had been stripped from every sinew of her sensuous body and streamed into the Empyrean in a glitter of silver, green, and purple light.
The searing memory of her hard, fierce kiss against my mouth as she breathed, "I'll love you forever," while arcane sorceries gleamed from every vein in her body burned like a traitor's brand on my lips.
Then things got even worse.
"Oh Ciaphas, don't mourn, darling!" A terribly familiar voice, like clanging forges mixed with the purr of a tiger, sounded a dozen feet above my head, and I lifted tear-stained cheeks.
It was Emeli.
It was a demon.
It was wearing the necklace I had used to try and assassinate her.
Frakking *warp.*
"Emeli?" I choked, hugging her emptied corpse in front of me like a shield has the towering sexual splendor of the demon smote my eyes.
"Caiphas!" She stared at me, and I suddenly got the sense of a lovestruck, snorting stallion, sidling up to a mare.
"I can't thank you enough, beloved!" The demon crouched, and I flinched as she scooped me *and* her corpse into an embrace as thrilling as it was terrifying. I found my face squished into an enormous bosom, the breath squeezed from my body, and I did the one thing I could think of that would result in a slim chance of survival: I choked, "A little looser, dear, I can't breathe!"
"Oh!" the demon exclaimed, and wrapped one enormous hand around my torso while gently prising the corpse I was holding out of my death grip and holding it in the other vast, taloned hand. "Sorry, sorry," she laughed with all the joy of a newlywed racing down the aisle. "I don't know my own strength yet!"
"And all this!" Her laughter was a clangor of terrifying joy. One great hand reached out and traced the glittering jewels on her neck, and I heard the faint sound of screams echoing as her fingers brushed them, stealing some more of their glittering soul-substance. "A fortune in Eldar Soulstones! You sacrificed all of this power, all of this glory, your own chance at ascension and immortality into the Dark Prince's realm, for me!"
"Of...of course." I gasped, weakly. "Why wouldn't I?"
She laughed again, and even more terrifyingly, I saw tears begin to run down her face. "Oh, what did I ever do to deserve you, my love?"
Her demonic form shrank until she was, once again, the size I had known. The size I had made love to. The size of the same corpse she was lowering with the gentle care of a mother cat lowering a kitten into a nest. It was still a hideous, lascivious, lithe body, and I briefly toyed with the idea of striking her with my chainsword before my survival instincts slaughtered the thought like a commissar shooting a fleeing guardsman.
"Use me." She said. "Use my empty flesh to tell a tale of perfidious murder. Use it strike such a blow against the Giorbas's reign that their souls will howl in terror and humiliation for eternity." She stroked her own body, her human body, tenderly. "Nobody but our Coven need know the truth, and Slaanesh will delight in using the ferocious fable of my innocent life struck down by Corpse God's vile minions to torment every waking moment of our vile 'governor's' limited remaining lifespan." She smiled, her teeth perfect and pearly, her new fangs wicked and sharp.
She looked at the sprawled pieces of the corpses of Giorba's enforcers, the ones her howling mob of debutants had seized, bound, and sacrificed as the opener for this heretical ritual.
"Spread the story that I died for Slawkenberg. That I died to free us all." She purred. "And that you tried to save me. Krystobal will back you."
I nodded, mutely. Then I coerced my voice into a weak croak. "You're alive." I said, with a supreme effort of will forcing my voice into a tone of hope, brimming with emotion barely held in check instead of an unending shriek of horror echoing in the bowels of the soul I hoped to the Throne I still had. Then I forced myself to continue with what the horrifically powerful lovestruck demon so clearly wanted to hear. "You...you're," I couldn't quite force the word beautiful out of my lips, but the word, "Amazing" escaped, and I truly, supremely hoped that she wouldn't catch on to the exact definition of the word 'amazing' I was using.
She didn't, and I had the indescribable experience of a warp entity throwing herself into my arms and latching herself to my lips with a lascivious, proud, possessive kiss. Fangs have a distinctive texture against lips, and frenching a demon a very, very specific taste.
"Oh Ciaphas." she breathed. "My dark prince calls me, and I cannot stay long in the Materium. But the hours I have left are allllll yours."
The next few hours have been replayed in the ongoing highlight reel of my nightmares ever since, as the most incomparably terrifying experience I have ever had, up to and including those disgusting few hours in a Nurgelite cesspit filled with corpses.
At least this smelled better, and after I persuaded her into the shower, with the entirely ulterior motive that the hot water would wash off the stench of my sweat. Terror has a unique bouquet, and I was as certain as the death of Horus that I reeked of it, little though my 'beloved' seemed to notice.
And that's when I found out my aide, the incomparable Jurgan, doggedly loyal, efficient to a fault, and incredibly stubborn in the prissiest way imaginable, was a psyker.
The shower burst apart like an artillery shell, my aide, floating a foot off the ground, sailed in, the air crackling and crazing around him like a cross between a thunderstorm and a shattering mirror, and I felt reality *twist.* Emeli shrieked and destroyed the remains of the balneria by growing abruptly four times her size.
"GET AWAY FROM HIM, DEMON!" My aide bellowed, his hands arcing with fractal bursts of lightning. "I'll hold it off, commissar. RUN!"
Unfortunately for Jurgen's plans, Emeli's lower feet had become rather prehensile, and were locked around my ankles in a death grip of passionate possession, and her tail was still wrapped around my waist.
My voice cracked out with instinctive, immediate, authoritative command, "JURGEN. EMELI! BOTH OF YOU. STOP!"
The two froze. Jurgen's stilled limbs crackled with ozone, and Emile, her jaws bared, dripping scented soap and frothy bubble bath. Then they both both unlocked their gazes from eachother to turn a terrifying side-eye at me.
"We're all on the same side!" I lied shamelessly.
"Really?" My aide said. "She'd not devouring your soul?"
"No." I drew myself up to my full height, gently unlatched myself, wishing I had my sash, or my coat, or my hat, or a stitch of ANYTHING on to bolster my innate, entirely hollow authority. I had to content myself with my inches and a few flecks of foam.
"My soul's my own, and I'm keeping it." I drew a breath. "Emeli here just ascended, and to celebrate we were making love."
"Oh." Jurgen had the grace to look abashed. "Sorry, Sir. " He gave me a long look. "Recaf with squinch spice?" The code word for *are you under duress?* since I would never, under ANY circumstances, sully recaff with squinch spice of all things.
"No," I said, shaking my head at the safe word. "two sugars." I said, using the 'all clear, everything usual.' code. "I'm FINE, Jurgen, and I would appreciate it if my love," I nodded at Emeli, whose eyes grew wide and shining with *literal sparkles in their depths* as soon as she heard the words 'my love', "And my best man weren't tearing strips out of each other in my name."
Jurgen nodded slowly, then relaxed his hands. The eldrich energies coiling around every finger of his blunt hands disappeared as abruptly as he always made my empty morning recaf mug vanish into the kitchen. He dropped heavily to the ground, his knees flexing expertly and his boots crunching on the shattered rubble of the balneria tiling. I noticed Emeli looking incredibly impressed, and I wondered at exactly what the massively experienced sorceress had seen to impress her. "Carry on then." Jurgen continued. He looked a little hangdog. "Sorry for barging in, I thought she was about to eat you." Then he brightened. "I'll have that cup of recaff ready for you when you're done." He nodded even more firmly, then sidled out.
The mood had rather irretrievably changed, but Emile contented herself by spending the last little bit of her time on this mortal coil cuddled into the crook of my elbow as we went off in search of various articles of clothing. The hunt was appallingly mundane when compared with all the warp strangeness- a sock there, a twisted rip in the very fabric of reality there, a stirring acolyte here, hellish runes burned into elaborate carpeting, pieces of Giorba's enforcers over there, pants under an occasional table...
By the time I'd put myself back together, about half the cabal, including Krystabol, had awakened, and Emeli had pried herself loose from simpering on my arm to deliver a few instructions to her acolytes that the part of me utterly devoted to my own survival shamelessly filed away as something to run away screaming from. Or, more likely, saunter away in the manner guaranteed to attract the least attention.
Emeli vanished through the hole torn into reality, Jurgen brought me a recaff, and I managed to fob off the whole lot of them by claiming to need sleep. They found me a bed, and I while I intended to wait an hour, sneak out of there and off that warp-be-damned planet on the first available transport, I fell into exhausted slumber the instant my head touched the pillow.